Loyalty Program : Price Fixing?

Again, another post about Loyalty Program.. This is one bad experience from a friend that has bought lots of Reward Points but still can not understand his way to upgrade the membership to the highest level! Thanks for sharing..

Please read on so we can learn from his story..

Hello,

I’d like to pass this along since my post on the Official Forums keeps getting deleted. Hopefully you can get through to people to stand up so they don’t get taken advantage of.

I had a long frustrated conversation with Zynga billing today over the Loyalty Program. I started off as Gold Level and purchased 50% discount on $1000 RP the other day (after already being in Loyalty Program as Gold).

Once I saw that people had the Platinum (and Diamond) levels, I searched the MW game info to see “how much it would cost” to go from Gold status to Platinum.

When I spoke with Tech Support live Chat, they said they could not help me and referred me to Zynga Billing and provided their phone number.

I asked 2 simple questions:

1) Is it Dollars or LP that is responsible for moving the Progress Bar for the next status level?

2) How many Dollars/LP do “I” need to progress to the next level. Will it cost me $100, $200, $2,000, $2,000,000??? I would like to know before spending more money attempting to reach the next level to see if it makes sense financially to spend the money or not.


Answer to Question 1: It is the LP that is purchased. They could not tell me as they said the program is different for everybody. For instance, if you look closely at the screenshot it says “up to on the Gold and Platinum levels”.


The billing representative stated that not all Gold levels are the same. You could still only get 1X LP for every dollar. Just like Platinum could receive 1X, 2X, 3X, or 4X. The billing representative did not have an explanation as to reason why some get higher than other. You have to go to the Purchase Reward link to see what you are getting:


Notice the 2x Loyalty Points top right corner? That is how you can tell what your bonus is.

Furthermore, I wanted to know how much money I would need to spend to get to the next tier (Platinum in my case). Billing stated they did not know how it was calculated that it was different for everyone. I stated I am not concerned about anyone else. You have my account information in front of you. What will it take for just my account? They would not answer me. And repeated that it is different for everybody, they have no way of telling how much more.


Notice they tell you exactly how much you need to maintain, but never how much to achieve the next tier status.

When a program costs Zero dollars, it can be anything they like. When commerce is involved it is another whole ballgame. Basically the total amount is different for every player. It could be 1000 LP, it could be 10,000 LP. It’s whatever Zynga wants it to be, and without disclosing how much the total actually is.

So basically I have to make another RP purchase to see how much the progress bar moves (if at all), to get a rough estimate of how much one needs to spend.

Imagine going to buy a car and having the dealership say, Pay me $20,000 now and we’ll see if it’s enough to own the car. There are no refunds with Zynga so in this analogy you give $20,000.00. Just to have the dealer tell you, “I’m sorry, it was not enough. You can either walk away $20,000 less and no car or you can pay more and hopefully it’s enough to own the car”. That is bait and switch and is illegal the last time I checked. There is nothing stopping them for charging any amount they want. But you must state what the charge is, if money is involved. If this is not corrected, I will be contacting my State Attorney General to look into this.

So instead of being excited about progressing, I have stopped buying RPs until this is fixed. Meaning we know exactly how much is required to progress. If it was $50 I would do it right now. But I have no idea. It could be $2,000. No one at Zynga will tell.

I asked to be transferred to the person/group that would know. It was stone walled. They didn’t know who. They would “bring it up in their next meeting”.

Please share this with other Mafia Wars players in the hopes that Zynga does the right thing. Just tell us what we need to spend so we can make a proper decision to do it or not.

Thanks for listening.

Scary!

I never think that deep because I never dare to buy RPs that much!

But if it's true, Zynga you should describe everything clearly.. We're talking about money here.. and for a free online game which require us to spend our bucks, you should make a detail of charts or calculation on how to describe the upgrade for membership!

Why don't make it clearly stated for example : to become a Gold member, you must spend $500! To become Platinum member, purchase $1000! etc etc..

You are so neat and tidy for every rules, why not doing the same for the membership?